Mile
Zero

At this point, Caret has been in the Chrome Web Store for about a week. I think that's long enough to say that the store is a pretty miserable experience for developers.

When I first uploaded it last week, Caret had these terrible promo tiles that I threw together, mostly involving a big pile of carrots (ba dum bum). At some point, I made some slightly less terrible promo tiles, stripping it down to just bold colors and typography. Something set off the store's automated review process, and my new images got stuck in review for four days — during which time it was stuck at the very bottom of the store page and nobody saw it.

On Tuesday, I uploaded the first version of Caret that includes the go-to/command palette. That release is kind of a big deal--the palette is one of the things that people really love about Sublime, and I definitely wanted it in my editor. For some reason, this has triggered another automatic review, this one applied to the entire application. I can unpublish Caret, but I can't edit anything — or upload new versions — until someone checks off a box and approves my changes. No information has been provided on why it was flagged, or what I can do to prevent these delays in the future.

Even at the best of times, the store takes roughly 30 minutes to publish a new version. I'm used to pushing out changes continuously on the web, so slow updates drive me crazy. Between this and the approval hijinks, it feels like I'm developing for iOS, but without the sense of baseless moral superiority. What makes it really frustrating is the fact that the Play store for Android has none of these problems, so I know that they can be solved. There's just no indication that the Chrome team cares.

I was planning on publishing a separate, Google-free version of the app anyway, so I worked out how to deploy a standalone .crx file. The installation experience for these isn't great — the file has to be dragged onto the Chrome extensions list, and can't just be installed from the link — and it introduces another fun twist: even though they promised it would be possible for years, there's no way to download the private key that Google uses in the Chrome store, meaning that the two installations are treated as completely different applications when installed.

Fair enough: I'll just make the standalone version the "edge" release with a different icon, and let the web store lag behind a little bit. As a last twist of the knife, generating a .crx package as part of a process that A) won't include my entire Git history, and B) will work reliably across platforms, is a nightmare. Granted, this is partly due to issues with Grunt, but Chrome's not helping matters with its wacky packaging system.

All drama aside, everything's now set up in a way that, if not efficient, is at least not actively harmful. The new Caret home page is here, including a link to the preview channel file (currently 3 releases ahead of the store). As soon as Google decides I'm not a menace to society, I'll make it the default website for the store entry as well.

The problems with Google's web store bug me, not so much because they're annoying in and of themselves, but because they feel like they miss the point of what packaged web apps should be. Installing Caret is fast, secure, and easy to update, just as regular web apps are. Developing Caret, likewise, is exactly as easy and simple as writing a web app (easier, actually: I abuse flexbox like crazy for layout, because I know my users have a modern browser). Introducing this opaque, delay-ridden publication step in between development and installation just seems perverse. It won't stop people from using the store (if nothing else, external installation is too much of a pain not to go through the official channel), but it's certainly going to keep me from enjoying it.